MacOS - View CPU Temperature

There are many situations within a day when the CPU fans are going crazy, being it some heavy loaded JavaScript site, compiling Kamailio or other applications. I was looking for tools, either open source or from "trusted?" sources that I can use to check the CPU temperature on my MacOS Sierra, but should work also on older MacOSX versions.

Update: Jan 21, 2017 - added osx-cpu-temp

I ended up installing three applications, two command line tools and the other with GUI, all are free to use:

• iStats - open source cli - https://github.com/Chris911/iStats
• Intel (r) Power Gadget - GUI app - https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-power-gadget-20
• osx-cpu-temp - open source cli - https://github.com/lavoiesl/osx-cpu-temp

iStats is open source, Ruby is already installed on Mac OS, so installing it is as simple as running in a terminal:

sudo gem install iStats

Then execute istats and you should see something like:

Besides the CPU temperature, it shows fan and battery stats.

Intel Power Gadget - not open source (or I missed the link to the repo), but it is free to use and made by the guys that manufacture the CPU, so I expect to get more accurate values. After installation, once you start it and let you run for a while, you should see something like:

It shows the usage of power by CPUs, along with frequency and temperature, tracking the history of the values and displaying the charts for them.

osx-cpu-temp - open source written in C, therefor you need to install a C compiler in your MacOS. The codebase is tiny, ideal if you look at embedding such feature in your application. The application itself can be run from the directory, no need to install unless you want to make it available across the OS.

It has minimal output, the temperature, which can be displayed in Celsius or Fahrenheit, a matter of command line options -C or -F. 

Hopefully this post will save some time for people looking for similar tools!